Melody Man

By the late 1950s, Fields had been living large for nearly three decades. He held court at venues like the Waldorf?’s Crest Room, the Versailles in Miami Beach, and the Sahara in Vegas. Ava Gardner danced barefoot beside his piano and Meyer Lansky casually “insisted” he play three weeks at his Reno casino. He was a celebrated veteran of cocktail chic, jet-setting between stints at Caesar’s Palace, the Surf Club in Virginia Beach, and the St. Moritz in New York. He had toured the best rooms from London to Japan, played Carnegie Hall more than once, and shared the stage with the likes of Nat King Cole, Cab Calloway, Tommy and Jimmy Dor-sey, Artie Shaw, Louis Prima, and Harry James. But he felt cramped creatively. His record label, rca Victor, wasn’t allowing him any room to experiment. “Latin is a pet love,” Fields admits. “But I’m a melody man foremost and always. Latin melodies aren’t the only ones available. I like all types of music?—?jazz, classical, operatic, anything where the nature of the music is strong with melody. I felt constrained.” Fields broke his contract and became an independent producer.

In 1959, while playing an extended engagement at the Sherry Biltmore Hotel in Boston, Fields went into a studio and recorded a series of songs that blended Jewish melodies from his childhood with the rhythms and tempos of his Latin influences. He was just toying around, but that album, Bagels and Bongos, and the innovations it contained would end up being the defining statement of his career.

Fields never denied his Jewish roots but didn’t draw attention to them either. Even as he was spinning classic Jewish melodies like “Bei Mir Bist Du Schon” and “Raisins and Almonds” over rumba and paso-doble beats, Fields was only partially aware of what he was doing. Wittingly or not, he was the pioneer of Jewish-Latin fusion, which Kun calls “the Jewish Latin craze of the 1950s.” And Bagels and Bongos not only led the trend toward Jewish-inflected Latin sounds but also opened the field to all manner of fusion experiments. Avant-garde pianist Anthony Coleman has likened Fields’ knack for blending sounds to that of fusion standard-bearer Ahmad Jamal. He writes, “How could I have found the perfect soupçon of Romantic Irony to counterpoise the weight of the mournful Sephardic songs in my Sephardic Tinge project if it wasn’t for the revelation of Irving Fields’ Bagels and Bongos??”

Initially, Bagels and Bongos seems inconsequential and light, but if you pay close attention, you can hear just how much is going on: the subtle way Fields waggles a finger over a key, the little trill, or the insertion of a Latin, Jewish, French, classical, or Polynesian element. He coaxes the keyboard as though it were an orchestra, playing the highs like woodwinds or strings and the lows like horns. He improvises, but he’s not an iconoclast like Bud Powell?—?Bagels and Bongos isn’t jazz. He was influenced by Gershwin, but he doesn’t compose elaborate symphonic masterpieces. Fields is a lounge pianist, and he knows it. His mastery is not of singular artistic invention but rather of an uncanny ability to adapt across styles. It’s his technique, his control of the instrument, and his feel that are singular.

And what is his feel?? An intangible balance of interpretation, melodic phrasing, rhythmic sense, and beat? The emotional connection between the music and the musician, the earnestness of his expression? The sense of humour he brings to his music, a knack for tossing comic jabs into otherwise rapturous melodies? These little gestures elevate his oeuvre from the forgettable lounge kitsch it could be mistaken for. We are accustomed to thinking that important musical moments are based on self-conscious aesthetic choices, but Fields didn’t have a master plan to meld Latin and Jewish music or to be seen as a grand innovator. He was just winging it, squirrelling around for a fresh gimmick to hook an audience. He broke moulds as an afterthought, almost by accident.

Through the 1970s and ’80s, Fields continued to secure jobs?—?he had standing engagements at the Plaza Hotel and played private parties for the likes of Donald Trump and Candice Bergen?—?but he never again attained the happy glut of the 1950s. Fields remained steadfast, embittered only when he couldn’t play. Even past the age of seventy, his huckster charm and indomitable good humour kept him going. Still, as the twentieth century crested into the twenty-first, Fields was in recession. Hotels were divesting themselves of their pianos, and nightclubs were catering to rock shows and DJ nights. Then the unexpected happened.

Out of the blue, a young man called to ask Fields if he would be interested in recording with him. Fields invited him over on the spot. At the same time as Josh Dolgin, otherwise known as Socalled, was sitting in Fields’ Central Park South apartment, Josh Kun was teaming up with Roger Bennett, publisher of the Jewish magazine Guilt & Pleasure, documentary filmmaker Jules Shell, and music industry types David Katznelson and Courtney Holt to liberate Fields’ 1959 classic from the archives of Universal Music. “When we first heard Bagels and Bongos, it just blew us away,” Bennett says. “We couldn’t understand why we hadn’t heard it before.” Their efforts eventually evolved into Reboot Stereophonic, a non-profit venture for reissuing what Bennett calls “the lost history of electrifying and challenging music” mined from the Jewish past. In 2005, Bagels and Bongos served as their inaugural release.

These two boons set off a chain of related events, including write-ups in the New York Times and hip magazines like Flaunt, an appearance on Barbara Walters’ The View, DJ remixes of Fields’ songs, and not least, his performance at Pop Montreal. “He’s more popular at ninety-one than he was at sixty,” says Dan Seligman, Pop Montreal’s creative director and the man who put Fields on the bill. “He’s an incredible musician and creative force. That he decided to express it through cocktail lounges and society hotels doesn’t diminish that.”

A few weeks after Pop Montreal, Fields is casually sipping a stinger and winking at diners from behind his piano in the wood-panelled coziness of Nino’s Tuscany, the chic Manhattan eatery where he has a gig five nights a week. Fields seems in his element.

“I have a joke for you,” he says to no one in particular. “Three notes walk into a bar?—?a C, an E-flat, and a G. ‘I’m sorry,’ the bartender says. ‘We don’t serve minors.’?” Fields pauses. “So the E-flat leaves and the C and the G have a fifth between them.” Laughter rings out across the room, and the piano player, grinning like a kid, starts into the first resplendent bars of “Glow Worm.”?•